Infertility Options
A federal judge has dismissed Wheaton College’s lawsuit against the Obama administration for requiring the evangelical Christian college to offer health insurance that covers the cost of contraception, including the morning-after pill, for employees.
The judge’s decision comes just two weeks after the west suburban college was granted an additional year to meet the requirement. Read full article.
Ishrat Hussain says she locked herself in her room when she learned she could not conceive.
Two years after her wedding and still not pregnant, the 26-year-old visited a gynecologist, who diagnosed her with polycystic ovary syndrome, an endocrine disorder that can cause women to stop ovulating, gain unusual weight, develop irregular periods or skin problems and grow abnormal facial and body hair.
Hussain struggles to describe how people ridiculed her in her community in Kashmir, where infertility is taboo.
“An infertile woman is generally viewed as incomplete with a notion of having a curse bestowed for some misdeed,” she says tearfully.
Dr. Ashraf Ganaie, an endocrinologist at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, says plenty of other women share Hussain’s problem amid the decades-old conflict and related uncertainties of life in the Kashmir Valley, a disputed territory between India and Pakistan.
He says an unpublished study that he supervised attributed 90 percent of infertility cases in the valley to polycystic ovary syndrome and related diseases, 5 percent to premature ovarian failure and another 5 percent to other stressors in life.
“In the last few years, we have received more than 150 women who suffer from premature ovarian failure,” he says.
Clinical psychologist Iram Nazir says that stress can negatively affect women’s hormonal levels. Read full article.
The London Summit on Family Planning held in July marked a commitment by Melinda Gates to improve access to affordable contraception in the world’s poorest countries by 2020. Some of these countries are on our doorstep. In Papua New Guinea only one in five women uses a modern method of contraception compared to almost three quarters of Australian women.
I have seen the challenges of providing effective contraception in Papua New Guinea first-hand. Just over four years ago I was lucky enough to visit the very beautiful and remote Highlands and was naively delighted to come across a village health centre well supplied with boxes and boxes of female condoms. The female condom is useful not just for contraception but also to prevent sexually transmissible infections. A combination of myths, misunderstandings and a simple lack of information meant they ended up being used for an altogether different purpose. The female condom is, I discovered, a very neat way to catch small fish!
This is an extreme example but misconceptions and myths about contraception not only happen in Port Moresby but also in Port Macquarie, Sydney and Dubbo. Some of the more common myths in the field of contraception relate to its effect on future fertility, the risk of cancer and its effect on body weight. I was recently asked whether contraceptive implants can migrate from the arm to some distant part of the body resulting in infertility later on. The short answer is: no. The contraceptive implant, a 4-centimetre flexible rod, is inserted just under the skin of the upper inner arm where it stays in place for up to three years and can be readily located and removed when required.
(Medical Xpress)—Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) can be coaxed into becoming precursor sperm cells, suggesting that it might be possible one day to restore fertility for sterile males with an easily obtained skin sample, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their findings are available today in the online version of Cell Reports. Read full article.
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Half of infertile women find their GP unsympathetic about their situation or ignorant about their condition and what services are available that might help them fulfil their desire to have a child, a survey has shown.
The leader of Britain’s family doctors said the findings were “surprising and worrying” and the profession should do more to help patients who were suffering what she called “a hidden pain”.
The National Infertility Awareness Campaign (Niac) surveyed 456 women attending fertility clinics, asking if their GP was sympathetic and helpful. Of the 419 who answered, 78% said yes and 22% said no.
When asked if their GP was knowledgeable about their condition and about infertility services, 52% said yes but almost as many, 48%, said no – “a very worrying statistic”, said Niac.
When the group cross-referenced answers to the two questions, it found that 50.5% said they found their family doctor was either unsympathetic or did not know enough about infertility. Read full article.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled Tuesday that Italy violated the rights of a couple by preventing them from screening in vitro fertilization embryos to avoid giving cystic fibrosis to a child. The couple found out that they were carriers of the disease after their first child was born with it. Read full article.
A breakthough in aiding male infertility may have been made as researchers ‘grow’ early stage sperm from human skin cells.
Scientists at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine carried out research to see whether they could induce adult cells and make them develop as a different type of cell.
The findings could greatly help male infertility and the increase the chance of childhood cancer sufferers being able to father children. Read full article.
A British woman whose husband donated sperm secretly has called for a change in law since sperm is a ‘marital asset’ and wants clinics to obtain the wife’s consent before the husband can donate sperm.
The Surrey-based woman has not been named in the Daily Mail, but she reportedly fears that children fathered with the sperm – who would be half-brothers or sisters of her son – may one day ‘disrupt’ the family by getting in touch.
The businesswoman has written to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) calling for guidelines on sperm donation to include the spouse’s views, and says the sperm should be treated as a joint ‘marital asset’.
The tabloid reported today that a controversial ruling in 2005 meant that children born through sperm donation – up to ten families are allowed per donor – have the right to trace their biological father when they reach adulthood. Read full article.
In the same week I read about a soaring demand for donated embryos, we received our quarterly storage invoice. There are more than 100,000 frozen embryos – including ours, our last one – in storage in Australia and yet demand is now ”outstripping supply by about 20 to one, meaning hundreds of people are on waiting lists at IVF clinics hoping for an embryo”, as Fairfax reported earlier this month.
It’s a curious situation but, as researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney discovered, many Australian couples (more than 40 per cent) are simply refusing to donate their spare embryos.
Many who go through IVF and have stored embryos would appreciate what other infertile couples are going through (in fact, ”feeling compassion for others struggling with infertility” remains high on the list of motives of those who do choose to donate). Bearing that in mind, things just don’t seem to add up.
These latest reports hit a particularly raw nerve for us. While we may have completed our family, as time marches on, notions of donating the embryo – or blastocyst – for research (worthy) or having it destroyed (almost unthinkable) seem less and less viable. Read full article.
More than eight years after alleging hormone therapy drugs caused and promoted her breast cancer, Toshiko Okuda is finally getting her day in court.
Okuda was among dozens of Utah women — and thousands nationwide — who filed federal civil lawsuits against Wyeth and other drug manufacturers after researchers halted a National Institutes of Health sponsored study in 2002 upon finding an increased risk of invasive breast cancer among those using hormone replacement drugs. Her lawsuit, along with 68 others filed in Utah, was initially transferred to the Eastern District of Arkansas; three were remanded back to Utah’s district court in April 2010. Read full article.